My favorite room in my mother’s house is my little marble bathroom, off my bedroom, tucked away and out of sight. It is papered, humble baseboards to regal crown, in black and white rustic French toile. As I grew up, I would stare through the rising steam at the happy peasants that peopled my pretty walls. I named them all, as they performed their pleasant peasant tasks. Jean was lifting up the bucket from the well. Jacques was herding the sheep. And Marie-Louise was lifting her voluptuous skirts in one hand, balancing a basket of eggs on the other. With my magic carpet towel and my imagination, I would transport myself into the patch of toile chickens and ducks, hustling with Marie-Louise after happy hens, collecting the oblong pearls from nests about the farmhouse, and bustling near the pot-bellied stove that undoubtedly stood at the bottom end of the pipe-smoking chimney that coughed out of the cottage’s thatched roof. What I appreciate about Eggland’s Best is that I feel, when I cook with the free-range and organic eggs, as I often do, that these darlings may indeed have found their way into my fridge from Marie-Louise’s straw basket. The yolks are firm; the whites, gloopy—as they should be. Eggs are a requisite in French cooking, but their versatility in that cuisine is exceptional. My first recipe for Eggland’s Best, Mini Crustless Quiches with Fines Herbes and Chèvre, comes straight from Marie-Louise’s pot-bellied stove: rustic, hearty, wholesome, like sunshine. The second, Garden Strawberries with Champagne Sabayon, comes from the Manor House up the hill: refined, delicate, elegant, like moonlight. Click
here for the recipe. Eggs are both these things. But above all, no matter how many hats we hang on Humpty Dumpty’s head, these egg recipes are easy and classy. The egg can do things in the kitchen that no other food can do. It is peerless, and precious.